Lyndon B. Johnson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In conjunction with the civil rights movement, Johnson overcame southern resistance and convinced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed most forms of racial segregation. John F. Kennedy originally proposed the civil rights bill in June 1963.[43] He called the congressional leaders to the White House in late October 1963 to line up the necessary votes in the House for passage.[44][45] After Kennedy's death, it was Johnson who broke a filibuster by Southern Democrats begun in March 1964 and pushed the bill through the Senate.[46] Johnson signed the revised and stronger bill into law on July 2, 1964.[46] Legend has it that, as he put down his pen,
J[B]ohnson told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation", anticipating a coming backlash from Southern whites against Johnson's Democratic Party.[47][/B]
In 1965, he achieved passage of a second civil rights bill, the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination in voting, thus allowing millions of southern blacks to vote for the first time. In accordance with the act, several states, "seven of the eleven southern states of the former confederacy" - Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia — were subjected to the procedure of preclearance in 1965, while Texas, home to the majority of the African American population at the time, followed in 1975.[48]
After the murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, Johnson went on television to announce the arrest of four Ku Klux Klansmen implicated in her death. He angrily denounced the Klan as a "hooded society of bigots," and warned them to "return to a decent society before it's too late." Johnson was the first President to arrest and prosecute members of the Klan since Ulysses S. Grant about 93 years earlier.[49] He turned the themes of Christian redemption to push for civil rights, thereby mobilizing support from churches North and South.[50]
At the Howard University commencement address on June 4, 1965, he said that both the government and the nation needed to help achieve goals:
“ To shatter forever not only the barriers of law and public practice, but the walls which bound the condition of many by the color of his skin. To dissolve, as best we can, the antique enmities of the heart which diminish the holder, divide the great democracy, and do wrong — great wrong — to the children of God...[51] ”
In 1967, Johnson nominated civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall to be the first African American Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
